Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday January 10, 2011 @08:22PM
from the time-to-rethink-the-refresh-internet-button dept.

phands writes "A few users are complaining that Windows Phone 7 is eating data plans alive. One user estimates idle data usage at 3-5 Mb per hour. Not good for a phone which seems to be struggling against Android and iPhone."

Obviously this is a design feature. Win Phone 7 is simply using "the cloud" for its virtual memory swap space. Only 30 - 50 MB per day shows how efficient their phones actually are at using their new VM technology.

Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. The phones are clogged with malware within 30 seconds of booting, and immediately start blasting out spam and attempting to infect other phones.

Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. The phones are clogged with malware within 30 seconds of booting, and immediately start blasting out spam and attempting to infect other phones.

It's the same as always, Buy Microsoft and get hosed. With android and apple phones about what fool would buy a Microsoft phone?

Scherotter said while a few major apps will be able to multitask, such as Pandora, the music streaming app that will play in the background while the user is doing something else, independent apps will not, for now. Scherotter said that eventually, independent apps will be multitask-capable, but he wouldn't say when that would be.

Scherotter said while a few major apps will be able to multitask, such as Pandora, the music streaming app that will play in the background while the user is doing something else, independent apps will not, for now. Scherotter said that eventually, independent apps will be multitask-capable, but he wouldn't say when that would be.

Of course they didn't note exactly what those 'few major apps' are.

NOT correct. Please don't count on article titles to be correct. That's like counting on a slashdot summary being correct.

Currently, only Microsoft apps can multitask. The key words in the announcement... errr... sorry, article, are in bold below:

More importantly that multitasking is coming to Windows Phone 7, just no firm date;

Scherotter said while a few major apps will be able to multitask, such as Pandora, the music streaming app that will play in the background while the user is doing something else, independent apps will not, for now. Scherotter said that eventually, independent apps will be multitask-capable, but he wouldn't say when that would be.

And if you read the update, currently Zune is cited as the app that can do this.

So, let me correct your statement:

Actually there are a few major apps (third party) that MS has promised, at some future undisclosed date, may be allowed to run in the background.

Not sure about you, but when Microsoft DOES announce dates for things (Windows 93... 94... Vista as a couple examples) or features (those left out of Vista as examples), it's already something I dont lend much credence to. When they aren't even willing to announce a date, I have NO idea what to think.

That aside, point is, GP was correct. WP7 does not multitask anything but a few Microsoft released apps (or at least Zune).

I thought they named it that way in order to disassociate it from their PREVIOUS mobile OS disasters. I have a pocket PC and I will never trust MS with a mobile device again. WinCE and all its flavors were disasters. Why should Mobile 7 be any different?

The general public rejects 7, if for no other reason, it is different.

But the public hasn't rejected 7. And the public won't reject something just because it is different, look at smartphones. People embrace change, that's how we have progress.

I can guarantee you that if, given the choice between two machines of identical specs the only difference being one is running XP and the other is running 7, the vast majority of the general public would choose the XP machine

No you can't guarantee it, you have no possible way of guaranteeing it. Not only that but your only reasoning for it is that people don't like things that are different, which is obviously bullshit.

I have a windows mobile phone from the generation before. I tell everyone I'm able: it really is the worst product that I've ever seen actually released. I have NO idea how it was put on the market, because it is so fundamentally nonfunctional in so many primary features... I mean that statement says it alone.

I will never touch another MS mobile product again. It enrages me that they get away with multiple shit-products. DO NOT BUY!

Hah, I used to develop for WinCE and Windows Mobile. From time to time we would look at each other, exchange an "Are we really doing this? For real?" glance, then sigh and get back to our Sisyphean task.

It was always blindingly obvious that the chaps who developed the WinCE line did so on simulators on their desktops, not on actual phone hardware. The WinCE line has never, ever been designed for actual mobile use.

I did the same for many years. I know *WHY* they did it on sims. The hardware was not up to the task of actually running that POS os. Never mind activesync is the biggest POS software.

I also met over the years many of the guys working on the low level stuff. I would goto the classes thinking 'I must be missing something'. The same people would be in those classes asking fundamental C/make problems. I would ask 'what do you do?' 'oh I write the device driver for xyz'. When I would get back home I would instruct my test teams to crawl thru driver XYZ and fix it or file as many bugs as you find. It was a seriously broken system ground up. The software to debug sucked. The drivers sucked. The build system sucked. It sucked all around. The API was not quite Win32. The hardware was 'okayish' but not up to the task of CE. There is a reason linux/iOS/FreeBSD is eating MS's lunch in that market. The tools are better to use, and the APIs are actually 99% the same. There is a reason MS is in a dominate position on the desktop. The visual studio tools are way better than what everyone else has. In the mobile market the tools blow ass.

Balmer may scream 'developers' but they make some dreadful mobile dev tools. Its like they actually want to punish us to use their software. It may be better now. But a couple of years ago it was pretty pitiful.

There is a reason MS is in a dominate position on the desktop. The visual studio tools are way better than what everyone else has.

No real disagreement with the rest of your post but the reasons MS dominates on the desktop go WAY beyond the quality of their developer tools. Not to say those aren't important (they are) but I think DOS and Windows would probably have dominated even if their developer tools were much worse than they actually are.

It was always blindingly obvious that the chaps who developed the WinCE line did so on simulators on their desktops, not on actual phone hardware. The WinCE line has never, ever been designed for actual mobile use.

Your right, it wasnt developed for phone hardware or mobile use. It was made for embedded systems (typically on a ROM chip) in 1996. While it is possible to use it in a phone, its not pretty nor was it designed for them. Its supposed to be just a very trimmed down version of Windows for small devices that didnt need any extensions later on in its life span.

Your experiences and DO NOT BUY recommendation for the old OS are irrelevant.

Really? Really?!? In what corrupt and twisted world do you live in where previous products and services from a company are irrelevant to evaluating whether or not to buy current products or services from that company?

In what corrupt and twisted world do you live in where previous products and services from a company are irrelevant to evaluating whether or not to buy current products or services from that company?

Surely the far more important factor is what the current product is like. A lot of the complaints about Microsoft products turn out to be from people who saw an earlier version 10 years ago and who still assume that the current version has exactly the same problems. As jeffgeno said, Windows Mobile 7 has been totally rewritten, and it should be judged on its own merits.

Unfortunately, looking at the merits of the current OS, it does come up lacking. Microsoft released this product way too early. There are fa

But that is just FUD. You are making a statement that is not based in reality, but in your own preconceptions. It is the same as saying Linux is hard to use or administer because you tried it 10 years ago. It is the same as saying that the Mac doesn't have true multitasking because you tried it 10 years ago. Are you trying to claim that all these other operating systems have improved over the years but Windows has stayed the same?

It doesn't help anyone to perpetuate stereotypes about computers. It certainly

If the company releases a piece of shit product then it is not unreasonable to assume that their next product will also be a piece of shit. At a minimum wait and see if other purchasers of the next round come out.

The Microsoft of today is nothing like what it was 10, 15 years ago when it became fashionable to hate. If MS is an evil empire today, it's the empire of Brezhnev, not of Stalin. It's generally pretty reasonable and a decent citizen of our software community. It's perfectly legitimate to expect consistency from people, but companies are composed of people, and to a large extent, the people at Microsoft are different these days.

Judging expected performance based on past performance is perfectly reasonable. At least until you get new information on the new stuff.

I liked Angel, I liked Buffy, I liked Firefly. Hence I watched Doll House with expectations of it not sucking. (And yes, I have crappy taste).

I didn't really enjoy Transformers, Transformers 2 was even worse. I don't plan on seeing Transformers 3 at the cinema (I'd probably watch it when it makes it to TV if I was in the mood for some explosions though).

I don't know about consumer sites, but regarding slashdot let me paint you a picture:

Consider if you will, Fox News. They have a clear tilt. Their viewership is skewed based on that tilt. To maintain their viewership they have to maintain or increase their tilt. It's a closed, positive feedback loop. Fox can't change its tilt. Substitute, say, Huffington Post in place of Fox and you get the same result.

Slashdot works a little differently -- but it's the same result. More potent in fact, because the feedback loop is much more immediate and direct.

Example of said tilt -- barely anyone in this thread has anything to say about the issue mentioned in TFA. Not one single piece of insight, or information. Nada. The only discussion is about how bad MS is, and how bad they've been, and how they will continue to be bad, etc. Why even have a topic if that's the case? Why not just have a weekly "discuss how MS sucks" thread? At least that would be honest.

Another example of said tilt -- any thread involving DRM.

Also -- any comment by Miguel De Icaza.

Slashdot has chosen its sides a long time ago. There are voices of dissent or voices of reason from time to time, but they always get drowned out, and suppressed (modded down) by the groupthinkers/lemmings.

So finally, coming back to your question:

And they don't even bother with Slashdot or any consumer site that says their product is crap?

Why would anyone who is disliked by slashdot bother to read it then? What insight can they gain from it? What will they come away with, other than the opinion that they cannot get any useful criticism from this site, and they cannot ever 'win' over this crowd, so why even try?

Why would anyone who is disliked by slashdot bother to read it then? What insight can they gain from it? What will they come away with, other than the opinion that they cannot get any useful criticism from this site, and they cannot ever 'win' over this crowd, so why even try?

You obviously have never explored the history of the comp.os.os2.* newsgroups. Microsoft used to pay people to post FUD in those newsgroups, and outside of that, there were plenty of people who just wanted to troll.

That's simply not true. Windows Phone 7 does the same kind of push notifications iOS and Facebook updates only come over automatically for the couple people you have pinned on your screen. I've had one since launch and used 500MB the first month and 450 the second. I have no doubt a few users are having problem (likely leaving the Feedback option checked and their email) but it's not a widespread problem by any means.

Apple couldn't test it! They were too busy trying to get their test model back after it fell into the wrong hands! Yeah... that was pretty bone-headed too... even worse to claim "you're holding it wrong." I think someone's turtleneck is just a LITTLE too tight.

Apple couldn't really test the iPhone 4 antenna because they would have done most of the testing on site,

Then maybe they could have crossed the street. Maybe got in a van and driven across town. Called a cell phone company (like ATT for example) and tried to find out the median distance between towers, or the mean connect distance to a cell site, then tested at range. You know, FIELD testing, with some minimal technical muscle behind it.

Or do a controlled test in a controlled environment such as this one. [coolorama.com] Testing an antenna isn't rocket science. We make undergrads do it with far less expensive equipment than what Apple has at it's disposal.

Yeah and the test mules that were released into the real world were in a 3GS plastic case keeping the testers hands off the antennae. It was a classic case of Apple's need for secrecy keeping them from getting good testing data.

An unexpected side effect that would be hard to have considered during normal QA.

"unexpected"? Look, the point of quality assurance and testing is to test them in real-world scenarios. That means ways that people would be using it outside of Apple HQ. Yes, you might have to -gasp- not keep this counter-productive cult of secrecy around your product, yeah, its fine for a publicity stunt but when it undermines your quality of the product, like the iPhone 4 clearly proves, it is a danger to your company if it doesn't meet your customer's expectations, especially when, like Apple you try

when even Jobs couldn't wave his hand and make the PR problem go away, it was obvious that it wasn't really about the antenna.

So. because a technical problem couldn't be solved by more PR, it becomes obvious that the technical problem doesn't exist?

I'll admit that I don't know how much of an issue this really is, but your statement that Jobs couldn't wave his hand and make the PR problem go away, only causes me to think that it is because of a REAL problem, one thing PR can't fix is when the product actually has a real issue. If he HAD managed to make it go away by "waving his hand" that would be more likely to indicate that it wa

It can be very difficult. The signal to the tower can cause battery drainage as the communications chip in the phone ramps up power to compensate. Not to mention a number of things can interfere with the signal and cause this condition.

if you actually know what you are doing (and care) you don't do this sort of testing by wandering around the campus saying "Can you hear me now?". You make actual measurements. There are instruments designed for this purpose. Of course, actual engineers are needed to design the tests and interpret the results, which may be the problem.

About how hard it was for Apple to the their iPhone 4 through normal use case scenarios for things like antenna reception. Sometimes random things are missed, mixed with what was the testing area like? Might have caused unforeseen fixes (a la iPhone 4 was tested near a cell tower if I remember right, why they missed the antenna reception issue.). Also, it seems most of the complaints are from US users, not global users so it could be something up with how the US carriers are handling the phones, which wouldn't come up in a normal use scenario. Maybe US carriers are trying to ping the phones and the pings are accidentally sending more information then they should?

On a completely side note, is it just me or does Ballmer look really haggered and worn in that photo? Maybe all is not going well for him at Microsoft and its really starting to wear on him?

as a software developer, I could see how Apple might have missed that. Mind you, it was a boneheaded move and even more boneheaded was to deny it once it became obvious. I guess the Reality Distortion Field really exists at Apple.

But this, these guys at MSFT aren't even trying. It's sad that companies like MSFT are rewarded with success when it's clear then are just completely phoning it in (pun intended). Though, I do think the Windows 7 Series Millenium Extra Plus CallsForSure Super 7 Series Phone (or

If a Reality Distortion Field exists in Cupertino, then an alternate reality machine exists at Redmond, one where mediocrity is excellence and complete failure is good enough.

That's pretty much true in any business though. It's part of moral boosting, to make people think and act like they are building a great product during the fact. When it happens, they will still pat themselves on the back, helps their workers keep trying because if you don't you'll either be left with mopey, useless workers or people who quit. Neither one is good for the business and it's a big part of a managers job to prevent it from happening. Businesses that don't do this tend to fail and close up pretty fast.

When it happens, they will still pat themselves on the back, helps their workers keep trying because if you don't you'll either be left with mopey, useless workers or people who quit.

...wait. You want workers who design crappy products to quit? That's a novel idea. Next you'll be suggesting that they replace those crappy workers with employees that are actually competent enough to design a good product...

I think that a lot of the problems that Microsoft (and Apple) have has to do with management rather than incompetent employees. Everyone I've talked to who works at both MS and Apple know what they are doing, but rather management wants them to do it a different way. Just look at the Apple III, it wasn't a huge commercial failure because Apple's engineers didn't know that they needed a way to dissipate heat from the computer, but it was a huge commercial failure because Steve Jobs forbid them from using the most reliable way to dissipate heat in hopes of making a "silent" computer. Its things like that, those upper-level or mid-level management decisions that force logic-driven people to act illogically.

If you reward failure you'll get more failure. If you want to maintain morale, tell the team you're sure the next project will go better and that failure is an essential element of later success. You do NOT tell them that was perfect and keep it up.

I think Apple's antenna testing problems may be due to the fact that the iPhone 4 was always encased in a plastic disguise while outside the lab, so the tester's hand never actually came into contact with the antenna.

It didn't come out of its disguise until it was in mass production, and actual users couldn't wrap their hands around it, triggering the antenna problem, until it was available.

So, extreme secrecy is to blame for this. Maybe next time they'll find a way to test it naked outside the lab.:P

About how hard it was for Apple to the their iPhone 4 through normal use case scenarios for things like antenna reception. Sometimes random things are missed, mixed with what was the testing area like? Might have caused unforeseen fixes (a la iPhone 4 was tested near a cell tower if I remember right, why they missed the antenna reception issue.). Also, it seems most of the complaints are from US users, not global users so it could be something up with how the US carriers are handling the phones, which wouldn't come up in a normal use scenario. Maybe US carriers are trying to ping the phones and the pings are accidentally sending more information then they should?

I call bullshit.

If you test your device in best-case-scenarios, you're incompetent. In the case of a cell phone, whose main purpose is to transmit and receive data (be it voice or other), it's inherently obvious that due-diligence requires you to test it extensively in marginal and poor-reception areas. You also test it extensively in high temperature and low temperature environments as well as any other common but extreme circumstances that historic evidence shows impacts battery life. You test it with all radios (Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G) enabled and stepped up to maximum power due to range issues. You extensively test its operation at extremes such as when the memory is almost entirely full due to someone having taken photos without a memory card, or voice memos. You extensively test when bandwidth is limited due to network saturation. You extensively test in crappy markets where more sand is likely to get in your phone than RF signal. You monitor all the important metrics of your phone (battery life, reliability and speed of link, efficiency of data transmission, use of storage memory and so on) in all the miserable hellish, abusive, real-life scenarios that your (hopefully) millions of units shipped will experience day-to-day.

Once you've tested in all those cases, then you can do whatever you want next door to a cell tower, in climate-controlled circumstances, with empty RAM and plugged into a nuclear power plant for unlimited power and in the single country of your choice.

Note: yes, I realize proof-of-concept and lab testing comes first. I refer to product-quality and suitability-for-sale testing. The stuff that Apple (and possibly MS) got wrong. -- Hey, those are both the companies that decided it was more important to ship "now, now, now!" than include Cut & Paste in their 1.0 products. They're not cutting corners at all.

At the recent Microsoft TechEd, pretty much all of the Windows 7 talks and tutorials were about how cloudy Phone 7 was and how it just used Facebook and all that other stuff directly and so on and so forth.

I asked a couple of different people whether this would mean it would chew a bunch of bandwidth, and the impression I got was that (to paraphrase) "Pretty much everyone is going to have decent data plans these days anyway, so we don't think it's a problem".

The Windows 7 phone is chatty by design, I think they just expect data plans to catch up with it's usage until it's not a problem any more.

You're right. Windows Phone 7 is very cloud-focused -- so much that they didn't bother to expose the APIs for local databases. The data usage is definitely going to be higher than other less-connected devices. My best guess is that these people might have unrealistic expectations as to the amount of data these services use and are getting excessive push notifications, either from having too many live tiles or just ones that update too frequently. Next to that, a live tile might be crashing and perhaps the phone is sending debug information back home. The reports of using 3G even when wifi is available are interesting though, and suggest there might be another problem.

That said, in my experience it still doesn't use a significant amount of data. I have a Windows Phone 7 device, and am using a lot of those cloud services. Instant email sync for two accounts (one fairly high-traffic), twitter, a few other live tiles, and the tracking service that occasionally wakes up GPS to ping MS with your location in case you lose your phone. When I'm at home it all goes over wifi like it's supposed to. I'm about 2/3rd of the way through my billing cycle and I'm still very very far under my bandwidth limit.

Live Tiles use the cellular radio by preference over WiFi, on the assumption that Push Notifications *should* go through if at all possible, and the cellular radio lets you maintain a persistent connection better than WiFi (which might not even have Internet access at all). Push notifications will apparently fall back to WiFi if they lose cellular connection, but they won't switch over automatically.

I disagree with this design - I think that every time you join a WiFi network the phone should probe it for a

It's going to suck mightily for them if unlimited data plans go the way that unlimited home broadband plans are, and if the end of network neutrality makes it possible to charge extra for packets exchanged with a site owned by a company that hasn't signed some kind of deal with your ISP. That cloud stuff's not going to seem so neat when a user has to pay extra fees just to use basic features of their devices.

My experience with Windows started at 3.1. I was an NT early adopter but had to support Windows 95/98/ME. About the time I noticed that the Plus! pack for Windows XP was bigger than the entire OS and Plus! distribution for 98, I realized that every release was bigger, in some cases a LOT bigger, and slower. In some cases, a LOT slower.

It seemed like Microsoft was betting HEAVILY that computer speed and storage prices would continue to keep up with the bloat. It's possible that when Vista came out and initially had poor performance on the hardware at the time, the issue wasn't really that Vista was too slow but that the hardware that users had on their desk did not progress as much as Microsoft had been betting it would. Eventually the hardware did catch up and Vista runs fine now.

I had similar experiences (although not for as long a time) with Windows Mobile. I had a Windows Mobile 5 phone and it was a pig. I had to reboot it regularly and doing any operation beyond initiating or answering calls was an exercise in patience.

When Mobile 6 became available, I jumped on it.

And it was *worse*. I now realize that this is probably because I had not jumped the gap to the next generation hardware.

And so, I'm not surprised at all that the design process for Mobile 7 probably included the assumption that we would have significantly faster hardware, on networks of significantly higher capacity *and* speed (which are two different things) and that they may have been a little too optimistic in that regard.

In Australia we havent even got decent dataplans, its all between 20Mb to 500Mb. The 1Gb & 2GB plans are hideously expensive.

Really? You actually consider $49 per month to be 'hideously expensive'? That's not even just data, that's voice and sms too. For $59 you can go with Optus and get 2GB of Data, something in the order $500-$700 of calls and unlimited SMS...im not sure how you can consider this so far out of the range of affordable.

I noticed the line at the end of the BBC article and couldn't believe what I was reading - does WP7 actually lack copy-n-paste capabilities? Apple took some justified shit for waiting years to include that capability in iPhoneOS. If that's for real, then WP7 deserves its unpopularity.

I had a chance to play with a WP7 device at a big box tech retailer on NYE (oddly, mere moments before getting an iPhone after a spontaneous discussion with my partner about my former piece-o-junk phone[0]). The interface was snappy, but it was pretty obvious why - solid colours, simple text. I have to wonder how well a WP7 device would operate under load with some third-party software installed.

[0] An LG Neon TE365F. Go ahead and laugh, I deserve it for purchasing such a turd.

Until later this month, yes it lacks copy/paste. This has actually already been done (as a feature) for some time; it's been demoed a few times and I'm told it's available to people on the WP7 team at MS, but it's not widely deployed just yet.

As for your comment on the interface, I'm curious what computer graphics knowledge you have that makes you think "solid colors, simple text" with advanced animations (such as the ones that happen when you enter or leave the Start screen) are easier to do than the iOS o

It doesn't surprise me that a problem like this has surfaced. As several posters have already pointed out, it's almost impossible to tell what kind of problems a prototype is going to have in the field under live conditions. None of us know what the exact Microsoft (or Apple, or Google, or whoever) testing conditions are before they release a product. To be sure, a wide, varied testing protocol would ensure the best outcomes, however, these are giant corporations with lots of money, but who also have to ens

It shows how much the world has changed when you start to feel pity for MS

yeah yeah they're still huge and all that...but it's easy to argue that they are bewildered and in decline. They haven't had a _real_ success is about a decade. Win7 is doing well but not 'off the charts' and they seem as surprised as anyone at the consumer interest the Kinect in generating.

If you put your name on a product, you are responsible. I don't care if they contracted stuff out to third parties - someone at Microsoft is signing the cheques. Since they bought it, it's their baby. If they cared about their product, they wouldn't allow it to be made from inferior parts.

Optical drives you or I purchase from LG, Toshiba, BenQ and LiteOn have a bumper to prevent disc damage. The drives found in retail beige boxes all have them too. Somebody directed the manufacturers to leave it out of Xbox drives. If Microsoft put their name to it, they wear the blame.